After 666 days,

Open Forum
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Thank you, and see you soon.

Hello everyone, I have been using LingQ for more than 666 days in a row (Insane mode) and it has been an extraordinary journey. I learned a lot. I started at A2 in French, and now I am C1. However, it’s not that beneficial for me anymore, and I would like to pursue a different strategy in order to keep learning efficiently. I want to thank Mr. Steve Kaufmann and the team working behind this tool. I know it’s not perfect and it has some bugs, but it is an amazing way to learn naturally and to prepare for exams, given the number of phrases and words that you can save for Anki cards or using the website tools. I really loved that I was holding first place on the ladder, and it kept me going and pushing my limits, but it’s time to hand it over to Mr.sirsteelchum. It was a fun run. I have some tips for new learners: Believe in yourself and keep pushing. It will be hard at first, but you will not believe how, out of nowhere, you will find yourself understanding without the need to memorize every single word you are hearing. So, listen a lot, read a lot, and please don’t TRANSLATE at your first stages; just understand the language as is, and you will get it as you go. I will surely be back for Spanish during this year, cya till then. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

French version:
Bonjour à tous, j’utilise LingQ depuis plus de 666 jours d’affilée (mode Insane) et ça a été un parcours manifique j’ai beaucoup appris, j’ai commencé à A2 en français, et maintenant je suis C1. Pourtant, ce n’est plus si utile pour moi, et j’aimerais poursuivre une stratégie différente pour continuer à apprendre efficacement. Je tiens à remercier M. Steve Kaufmann et l’équipe qui travaille derrière cet outil. Je sais que ce n’est pas parfait et qu’il a quelques bugs, mais c’est une moyenne incroyable d’apprendre naturellement et de se préparer aux examens avec le nombre de phrases et de mots que vous pouvez enregistrer pour Anki ou en utilisant les outils du site Web. J’ai honnêtement adoré le fait que je détenais la première place sur l’échelle, et cela m’a permis de continuer et de repousser mes limites, mais il est temps de passer le relais à Mr.sirsteelchum. J’ai quelques conseils pour les nouveaux apprenants: croyez en vous et continuez à pousser. Ce sera difficile au départ, cependant, vous ne croirez pas à quel point vous comprendrez sans avoir besoin de mémoriser chaque mot que vous entendez. Alors, écoutez beaucoup, lisez beaucoup et s’il vous plaît, NE TRADUISEZ PAS lors de vos premières étapes, comprenez la langue telle quelle, et vous l’obtiendrez au fur et à mesure. Je reviendrai à coup sûr pour l’espagnol au cours de cette année, chao jusque-là. Si vous avez des questions, n’hésitez pas à les poser

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Higher end content is difficult to find, especially good audio. However, I’m C2 in written English (C1 in spoken), and I also use LingQ for my English. I find the system still useful to get simple definitions of rarer words (It’s also only my 20th day, so maybe in 333 days I’ll stop) .

LingQ (or any app) obviously doesn’t replace making your own vocab deck with Anki (or other methods) for more fine-tuning and customization, and at some point you DO need to grind grammar and syntax to improve further in a language (at least that’s my opinion).

So I was wondering, what are your reasons for quitting LingQ, and how have you decided to further improve your mastery of French ?

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100% agree; you have to do some grammar every now and then to keep a good understanding of the language.

Answering your question. I do find that watching YouTube or Netflix alongside reading books or whatever you find interesting, will help you better understand and immerse yourself into the language. Because, as you know, sometimes Lingq is excellent and everything, but it feels like studying.

So, right now, I am living with English and French; it’s a part of my life, not just a daily activity.

Sidenote: Please don’t make the same mistake that I did. I kept watching a lotI mean A LOT, and forgot to write and read and my writing skills were so bad. So, I didn’t make the same mistake with French.
What I am saying is, Lingq is a very powerful tool, especially when you are in your early stages till B2, but afterwords it’s not as useful as before.

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Thanks for sharing your experience and congrats on your progress!

I also use Lingq for advanced French and Portuñol. My French level is pretty advanced but I still find LingQ to be the best tool to help me push further. I use it to read literature and academic articles. I think it further solidifies my grasp of the nuances of the languages in an engaging way.

I’m curious: what other tools or approaches do you (and others) recommend for more advanced stages of learning?

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Thank you.

For me, for better understanding, you should always watch and read what the native language holders do. So, for example, watch YouTube on something that you find interesting and that can keep you engaged, so you will practice on a daily basis without the feeling that you are studying or doing it forcibly (unless you find Lingq is your YouTube or the app that you use the most). I say YouTube because, right now, I rarely search for or learn about anything in my mother tongue, I use only English or French without having the need to come here anymore.

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Oh for sure, I agree that it’s critical to do what you find interesting! Do you use the import function on Lingq though? I would have stopped using Lingq long ago if I didn’t do that. I’m taking university coursework in other languages right now, so I usually import the academic articles on Lingq too. I suppose I don’t really need to do that, but I still prefer it and I think it helps build my vocabulary. At least I’m not really aware of any other tools that can support me more for learning at advanced levels, except maybe by drilling ChatGPT for some lessons on grammar…

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:notes: Je suis allé seul, mon esprit était vide,
Il me faudrait de temps pour réfléchir,
Pour recuperer les souvenirs de ma mémoire…
Qu’ai-je vu ? Puis-je croire ?
Que ce que j’ai vus cette nuit-là était vrai, non seulement une imagination…? :notes: :guitar:

(Or at least that’s my attempt at French :smiley: )

Alright, jokes aside. Congratulations on such a long streak! As you say, I find that one of the many benefits is that I almost never “translate” in my mind. Which might be counter-intuitive, since LingQ is all about looking up translations. But well, if you know, you know. The translations don’t end up replacing the original language in my mind, they just become added information about the word or phrase I’m looking at.

In any other system, be it classes, be it more “traditional” apps, I find myself translating. On LingQ, I merely… Well, either I understand, or I do not!

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I did, actually. The problem is that it’s so buggy, and when you add bigger folders, it’s a little annoying, and it takes so much time. Maybe in the future, when it will function better and more smoothly, I might come back to it in every language as my main source. I totally agree with you when it comes to vocabulary. The yellow and blue colors are awesome and you can get how many new words you might learn from a lesson. Grammar = books for me. You should practice grammar alongside your active or passive learning because sometimes it happens to me when I can say or write something as it should be, but when I come across the grammar behind it, it solidifies my understanding.

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Quelle belle chanson, belle tentative !

Thank you, yes exactly, as you said, it’s added information, but you always should understand the language as is, like don’t translate every single word is what I mean.

Totaly, Lingq is one of the best if not the best. For sure I will be back for my Spanish.

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How did you find interesting content?

Did you only use Lingq?

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If you can´t find a reason to use Lingq in the future then you lack imagination more than anything. In my point of view I have found it very helpful for Swedish and I was already pretty good when I started with Lingq, taking C1 courses etc.
What I noticed in taking courses and using Lingq was just how little I knew when I thought I was good. With a language like French with so many dialects and content I´m not sure how anyone can get bored of it or not think of ways to incorporate Lingq into the learning process by simply following topical news through it. If it is a cost thing fair enough.
From your stats they don´t seem to be anywhere close near the top guys in French, one user seems to have 135,000 known words and 6 million words read.
alexilebert 135029
As far as lingqs this guy has got a lot and also 6 million words read.
pma04mts 359720
Whilst your listening stats are impressive, it is kind of the least useful part of Lingq really? I mean you could keep a listening diary in a book and it would have been about as useful. If you live in the country of the target language and work, study and/or watch TV in that target language you´d easily be on 2000 hours listening a year.
I would say the greatest utility on lingq is that not only can you learn a language to any level (using vflat to import hard books you never got round to reading, putting in a few news articles a day, getting how to instructionals from websites etc) you can also find the really rare words with high value, then using a tool like youglish.com really drill them.
There is also the community aspect and the fact you can get your writing marked.
I personally recommend Lingq to all my students and even more so to the advanced ones as they can do things like read academic documents using it and technical material.
Personally, I think you probably haven´t even scratched the surface.

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Not only that but you can use the translator in another language (I sometimes use the English reader and the Slovak dictionary). I mostly use the Swedish dictionary to add notes to the languages I am learning as it allows me to learn using Swedish rather than just learning Swedish.

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Yes. Your points are valid. I am living in a era of abundance. I have tons of content for learning English even though I am living in a kind a poor third world country. I just need to focus on my needs.

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I think that you missed my point. I never said Lingq in itself is not helpful. It’s just not that useful just for me and my way of learning. Yeah, it’s one great tool to learn, but still, it feels like you are doing a course or something. I prefer to make the learning process a part of my life. I don’t have so many known words or much reading because my style of studying is to read the script once but listen to it much much more. I love to read a real book. To sum up, Lingq is awesome, but it is not perfect for me.

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I use French or English to search for anything I want instead of my own language, so it becomes a daily thing without the need to force myself to do something I might not like. For example, any courses I want to take will be in English. Find the thing that you will find yourself wanting to watch without looking at the time and needing it to be finished. I used to force myself to watch some news and over time I got exhausted.

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That is fair enough. You can learn languages without Lingq, however I think you missed my point - you didn´t use some of the more unique features of Lingq and perhaps you didn´t realise.
Therefore in my point of view - you have had 666 days and yet a vast amount of Lingq users may not see why this particularly specific number equates to skill.
I am sure you are very good at French, and that´s great. Is it be better to have people around you? Sure. However I wish I started using Lingq back in 2008 when I was living in Sweden even though I had lots of socialisation with locals too. I think it would have amplified my abilities.
But I will say again - considering the massive amount of French dialects etc, I think it is hard to see how you can feel “complete”. There are 2 million articles in French on Wikipedia, there are specialist terms.
Here is an example, just one of many - I learned to do a lot of things in Swedish when I lived there. I could talk about politics easily, but I didn´t know any words relating to hand crafting things. So I can go onto Youglish.com, put in a term related to “how to make…” and I will come back with loads of instructional videos I can both listen to and read. These were holes in my Swedish which I didn´t even realise I had, and didn´t realise I had until a year ago. I think probably the more you interact with French, the more you will realise you have lots of holes which lingq will help you address.
Whilst you can learn anyway you like, I personally don´t think you used Lingq to its optimum capacity whilst still doing a fanstastic job. It was heavily slanted towards one skill, which is great if that is the skill you needed to work on most. For me I can read Danish very easily, but I find it hard to listen to and pronounce. Therefore Lingq really helps me for that language and I may never read it as much as I do another language, but I don´t have to, as Swedish and Danish words are very similar. Having said that, until you get to the point where you have about 300,000 known words (as seen some people have in German/Turkish etc) I don´t know if you have really “covered” the language to the degree you probably know your native one (yes, I realise not everyone has to use Lingq to achieve similar results).
If you´re doing a degree in French, communicate in French daily etc, that is better than Lingq to some degree.
But if you look at in another way, to get about 300k “words” (obviously counts all multiples) you probably have a passive vocab of about 15-30,000 roots (a lot of the words in any count are quite likely place names/names, but they are words too and change from language to language so legitimate to count them).
According to research I have read, university students in a foreign language have a functioning vocabulary of about 10,000 words. Considering in English we have about 4 spellings for each verb, adjectives/adverbs derivative to nouns/verbs, we are not truly talking about a lot of words. In Lingq, each derivative is counted.
Therefore taking a word like view, you have view, views, viewing, viewed, viewer, viewable etc. For walk, walk, walks, walking, walked, walker, walkable, walkability etc. As there aren´t so many pronouns, conjunctions etc, we can roughly say if one has a word count on Lingq of 10,000, we can probably remove about 1000 for nouns, 1000 for other parts of speech, you have about 8000 (at the most) roots which can be divided into about 6 and find out a vocabulary of 10,000 on Lingq represents about 1333 roots. This isn´t very much!
If we want to represent a native adults vocabulary on lingq (solely counting roots) you probably need at least 60-120,000 “known words” to even represent the average person. A writer/scientist/highly trained person is probably much higher.
Therefore if you´re a lingq user and want advice on how to use lingq to obtain a “native” level of understanding, in my opinion it is fair to say “you need to be aiming for about 120,000 words before you can even say you´re close to an average native.”
Everyone has different aims, but for me the best thing lingq can help someone to do is to assess what you´re missing out on. As a native English speaker, I could burn through five books a month to assess my knowledge and I´d have 100,000 words in a few months and a few hundred thousand in a year.
If a French person were to use French to read all their materials/entertainment, in a year they´d probably be on 100-200,000 known words fairly quickly. That is why I personally think if you are going to give advice to people about how to use lingq what may have been more informative is to explain what you´re doing outside of it and how lingq reinforces that (i.e: do you go to language meetings, make notes on new words/subjects, check the internet, import articles, are you in a french book club etc etc).
For me lingq is a very complicated tool which I already don´t fully use, so I´m a bit surprised someone is saying “I did 666 days and that is sufficient”.
I´m not saying you can´t do what you want, but at the point you are giving advice to others I think it´s fair to say from reading only your post and reviewing your stats, you didn´t use Lingq that much.
Not to say you did, but you can just write in 900 hours of listening and no one knows if that was or wasn´t done. Hence it is one of the weakest metrics to “prove” you used Lingq.

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First of all, let me thank you for your detailed answers and the advice that you are giving. Second of all, I never said it’s sufficient for a language never will. All I am saying I am taking other routes that are more useful for me. Again, Lingq is great, but I am not as hooked on it as before because of my learning methods. I didn’t use Lingq as my main source to learn; actually, I read a lot of books, watched like 100 thousand videos, and used apps to talk to other native speakers for more than 550 hours. Just a question: if the words are still yellow, does that mean that they’re not going to count as a known word? Because I leave like 70% of the words that I am not perfectly good at (I can use them in conversation or in text). I am pretty sure there is a misunderstanding because my goal isn’t to master the French language as a native. No, absolutely. I am super fine with the level I am at right now. The point of my post is motivational, not to tell people how to get C2 in French. That’s why I said I am here for any questions. However, I completely disagree with this part “but I didn´t know any words relating to hand crafting things” even if you don’t use it, or find it often in context, or at least every once in a while, you will forget about it. So that’s why I am not here anymore, it is about my needs, my way of learning, and my goals. I just want to watch something or use French for what I need and to step up my game naturally.

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I think the thing is this - you´re writing in the open forum and then saying you have used Lingq to the full extent you can right now, but if anyone has any questions about how to use lingq, please ask.
Personally, I´m not sure how you thought this was going to be received?
If you gave it context, such as “I am a university student in French language” or “i am studying in order to pass a test to get into French universities” and explained how you used Lingq as an aid to your learning, it would be informative.
The only thing people can take from what you have written is that you perhaps didn´t think “what do other people use lingq for?” and “do I use lingq in the way other people also wish to use lingq?”
I would say for most people, Lingq is completely different. People have said things in passing like “I have complete Portuguese…” etc, and I wonder “what?” and then it turns out they have used every available lesson in the libraries… yet this is almost a bit sad as that was not the point. Those are just there, you can import books, film scripts, newspaper articles, all of wikipedia. So when writing something like this it comes across a bit odd because we have no idea what your original goal was and why 666 days is significant.
For me - I want to take a test in Swedish proficiency, however once I pass that test I do not think I will need to not use Lingq anymore. I don´t see how the two are related. So I´m not sure why any other goal = no need for Lingq anymore. A situation I have experienced is before I used lingq I´d happily go to a cinema, watch a film in Swedish, watch TV shows in Swedish with or without subtitles, and think I hand understood everything. Then when I used Lingq I realised I had missed a lot of subtext and nuance.
As far as world levels, that is ultimately a personal choice. 1-2-3 = not in your known words. 4-5 = known words. If you think you know the word, and can use it in conversation, then why it would be not learned/known I am not sure. If you know the word to the same confidence you know words in your native language, then you should happily put it to learned/known in my opinion. This does not mean you have perfect recall (I forget words in English/spellings etc, wouldn´t classify them as “unknown”).
If you have forgotten it, or are unsure after a while, feel free to put it back again to yellow. However this is ultimately personal taste.
There are people who claim that they don´t include names etc, however I think this is a shortsighted step as different languages change names, so a name (Martin in English, Martin in Slovak) is a word, whilst in Slovak you also have 6 Martins as there are six cases, thus you need to be very sure you know “which” Martin you´re dealing with, the nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, locative or instrumental.
In French, there are so many conjugations ( Faire - French Verb Conjugations - Lawless French Verb Tables I think it is fair enough to mark a word as known so long as you recognise it when used.
I think you should also include for interested readers what goals you actually had with French and why it was important for you, because it really seems opaque why you have used Lingq in the manner you have described and it probably makes more sense if you put it in context.
I am sure you are very good at French, but there is a circular argument that if you are so good in French, Lingq was essentially a witness to your other courses/interactions and then perhaps you didn´t necessarily explore Lingq as much as you would have if you relied more on it. Therefore perhaps you have missed quite a few of its unique features and benefits, which if you knew… you wouldn´t be quitting it. Anyway, just my point of view! :wink:

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Once again, as you said at the end, “Anyway, just my point of view” and that’s about it, not everybody will see it that way. Using Lingq for 666 days is a lot, which means I enjoyed using it and benefited from it big time. However, that doesn’t mean I will rest in here forever, otherwise, I am not going to learn, even if there are other tools in here that I didn’t use. Again, again, my post was about thanking the people behind all of this, celebrating my achievement, and being here if anyone has any questions about learning not only about Lingq because the world of languages doesn’t revolve around Lingq, it’s a tool for learning languages. So, when you post in Lingq doesn’t mean it’s for and only Lingq and my experience here. Maybe you are right, according to your point of view, nonetheless, people’s approaches are different. In the end, thank you for stopping by and giving your time and energy to show me and others how to use Lingq better.

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I have a question … your advise to not translate … I sm just starting with Spanish … and almost all the words are not familiar for me … how would I understand anything if I don’t translate? … what your advise for someone who is just starting with the language